Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.

> I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing

They really are. I had a parttime coworker who moonlighted some mainframe job and he often had another laptop on his desk connected to a z/OS terminal. He would show me some of the jobs and code occasionally too, really fascinating stuff, and he was quite good at it and could navigate quickly.

PuTTY into Linux and you're in 16 colors.

<16-colors IBM z/OS host terminal

This hasn't been virtualized?

My Linux terminal is 256 colors. Two hundred fifty six! That's like, every color!

Damn mainframe people flaunting their 16 colors like they're a peacock or something. Shit. We only had one color (and one absence of a color) and that was good enough.

I work with developers who code on OS 2200 and VAX VMS (running on Charon emulation).

Fun fact: the first SMP UNIX implementation ran on top of EXEC 8, the kernel of OS 2200.

"Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/retro...

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114648/https://www.bell-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_1100/2200_series

16 colors is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic screens.

(paraphrased: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...)

OT: Do you know if was he being serious, joking, or "haha only serious" in the linked message?

Most of the comments by everyone in that thread are sarcastic, and the tone of the thread is lighthearted.

Pike genuinely doesn't seem to care for syntax highlighting, though understands that his is a minority opinion.

i think that's at least mostly serious. he's not a fan of syntax highlighting.

https://ctrl-c.us/posts/highlight

I used to work with the most amazing blind COBOL programmer on CICS code. His speed in finding and fixing code with a screen reader, was mind blowing.

24-bit color support (\033[38;2;rrr;ggg;bbbm) has been mainline in both Konsole and in libvte-based terminal emulators for many years. 16777216 colors. That's still not every color, but it's every color your monitor can display. When I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.c in 02016 I had it in Konsole but not libvte, though I think it had been added to libvte upstream. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.png

Color in terminal emulators was one of the main perks of Linux over other Unixes for me at first!

I’ve built systems for iSeries and none of the modern fancy GUI IDEs come close to the speed of those IBM 5250 terminals. You can still see such terminals in action in POCO baumarkt in Berlin.

One of the modules I saw in action was written before the moon landing, written by a lady programmer.

256 colors ought to be enough for anybody.

They're probably using a 3270 emulator on a PC, but that emulator will still display 16 colors.

I intentionally use 256 colors mode because I prefer the vibe :)